✩⁺₊✩☽⋆ 𝖕𝖗𝖔𝖑𝖔𝖌𝖚𝖊 ⋆☾✩⁺₊✩
ꜱᴇʙᴀꜱᴛɪᴀɴ | ꜱᴘʀɪɴɢ | 2 ʏᴇᴀʀꜱ ᴀɢᴏ
☆.𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊.☆
The mud was thick, clinging to my shoes and jeans with a heavy stench of rotten eggs and river moss. It was the kind of smell that stained your skin for days, no matter how much soap you used or how hard you scrubbed. I didn’t mind it though. Up here, knee-deep in the mountain lake, the world was quiet.
Living in Pelican Town felt like being stuck in purgatory. You saw the same faces every single day, went to the same predictable seasonal festivals, and listened to people recite the exact same small-talk scripts until they died and got buried in the dirt they’d walked on for eighty years. My only real goal in life was to leave and never look back—maybe head off to Zuzu City or somewhere else that was far away enough.
Who knew if I’d even be alive that long,I thought to myself.
Ribbit.
The bullfrog sitting motionless on the lilypad in front of me cut through the noise in my head. I always felt more comfortable around them; frogs didn’t expect anything from me. They didn’t need me to be a productive member of society. Around them,Iwas the one in control. If I moved, their world shifted. If I stayed still, time stopped.
And thus, so would the voice in my head that told me I was worthless.
My phone buzzed on a flat rock behind me, the screen lighting up as someone spammed my lock screen. I glanced back, watching the notifications bleed through the dark.
Fuck, not again.
Abigail [8:14 PM]:i’m outside the saloon where are u???
Abigail [8:14 PM]:sam says you’re probably emo-ing in the woods again.
Abigail [8:15 PM]:answer me seb. I’m bored.
I didn’t bother replying, letting the screen fade back to black. I hoped she’d get the hint that I wanted to be left alone for once. I liked Abigail—or,at least, I liked the concept of her—but lately, being around her felt less like a choice and more like a routine. We were just the two outcasts that the town lumped together because nobody else knew what to do with us.
My mother’s voice crept into my thoughts then. She’d spent half my childhood romanticizing “the spark”—some sort of instantaneous strike she claimed to feel the exact second she met Demetrius. She talked about true love like it was some sort of cosmic gift, a warm light that made the rest of the world fall into place.
But looking down at my mud-stained hands, the concept of love just felt more like a cosmicjokethan anything. If love was a spark, then I was made of damp wood. If I couldn’t feel that damned mythical connection with the girl I wassupposedto want—the one practically gift-wrapped for me by the universe—then I wasn’t just broken, I was a ghost in my own skin, waiting for someone to notice that I was already gone.
I had never felt more alone.
I turned back to the water, pushing the thoughts down into the sludge. I reached forward, my fingers hovering an inch above the lake’s surface, ready to pin the frog down.
“You’re going to lose him if you keep hesitating.”
The unfamiliar voice caught me off guard. Pelican Town was small enough that I knew every voice by heart, and this wasn’t one of them.
I jumped, losing my footing on the wet bank.Splash.The frog I had been hunting had managed to escape into the black water, leaving nothing but a ripple.
“Damnit,” I muttered, wiping my muddy hands on my jeans as I swung around.
A girl, around my age, was leaning against a birch tree. Her outfit caught my attention first—she didn’t look like anyone else around here. She wore an oversized black sweater that hung off one shoulder, sheer tights that were more holes than mesh, and aged Converse that look like they had been through hell.
“He was fast,” she said, her lips pulling into a half-smirk that didn’t feel particularly warm. “You weren’t.”
I stood up, trying to regain whatever dignity I had left while covered in pond scum. I was usually the one who was known for making people uncomfortable with my silence, but she was entirely unfazed.
“I had him until you opened your mouth,” I said, pulling a crumpled pack of cigarettes from my pocket. I fished around for my lighter, just needing something to do with my hands.
She pushed off the tree and walked closer. “I’m Violet.”
“Sebastian,” I replied, flicking my lighter. I didn’t bother offering her a cigarette.
“I know.”
I paused, the cigarette halfway to my mouth. “Wejustmet.”
“Small town. People talk. Apparently, there’s a guy who lives in a basement and hates the sun, people, and everything else in Stardew Valley. I figured the one person at the lake at this time of night would probably be him.”
She stepped out of the shadow of the birch tree, and the faint glow of the moonlight hit her face.
I froze.
I had spent twenty years looking at the same three dozen faces in this town, all of them predictable, all of them symmetrical, all of them boring and unappealing. But Violet’s eyes were unforgettable. Her left eye was a piercing, crystalline light blue—the color of the sky right before a winter blizzard. Her right eye was a deep, stormy grey, like the slate at the bottom of Mines.
It was a beautiful, biological error. It made her look as though she was caught between two different worlds, or like her body hadn’t quite decided on a soul yet.
I couldn’t look away. I was half-convinced that if I blinked, she’d dissolve back into the fog, just another trick my brain was playing to cope with another miserable night. I wanted to reach out and touch her arm, not to be affectionate, but just to prove that she was real and not a figment of my imagination. I wanted to prove that someone this fractured and perfect could actually exist in a place like this.
“I’m the inheritance, I guess,” she continued, completely indifferent to the way I was staring. She seemed entirely used to it. “The old farm by the woods? My grandparents died. I’m the lucky winner of their dirt.”
She said the worddiedso casually, it sent a shiver down my spine. Most people in town spoke about death in hushed, polite whispers, but she spoke about it like it was an old friend she’d known her entire life and grown bored of.
“Great,” I managed to say, leaning back against a boulder to keep my hands from shaking. I tried to pull up my usual shield of apathy, but it wasn’t working. I felt exposed under her gaze. “Welcome to the graveyard of Stardew Valley. Hope you like disappointment and shitty local gossip. It’s the only thing we grow in abundance here year-round.”
Violet let out a soft laugh, reached out, and plucked the lit cigarette directly from between my fingers. Her eyes never left mine. I watched her press her lips to the filter and felt a sudden, ruinous urge to lean in as she breathed out a small cloud of smoke—to let her exhale the toxins directly into my lungs so that I could finally have a reason to stop breathing.
The smoke drifted upward as she exhaled, shimmering under the moon.
“I’ve lived in graveyards before, Sebastian.” She took another slow drag before holding the cigarette back out to me. “The only difference between Pelican Town and the dirt is that the people here still have to pay rent... Well, except for Linus,” she smirked. “Just don’t mistake a pulse for a life.”
I took the cigarette back, my hand trembling just enough for the ash to scatter like grey snow between us. My brain was scrambling to figure out if what I was feeling right now counted as “the spark” or not. The way my mom had always spoken about it, she made it sound like it was home—but this wasn’t quite that.
I didn’t feel safe. I felt hunted.
It was the way she held herself, like she was a secret that the town wasn’t ready to hear yet. Her cynicism felt more honest than anything I’d heard in my life. I couldn’t help but feel intimidated by her, but at least for the first time, I wasn’t completely bored out of my fucking mind. She didn’t offer the comfort of a boring domestic farm life; she offered the cold, thrilling clarity of reality. I realized then that I didn’t want someone to make me feel at home. I wanted someone who looked at the world and saw the same graveyard I did.
“You should probably answer that,” she said, her gaze drifting to the rock where Abigail was now calling. “Whoever it is, seems...persistent.”
"Sheis.” I tried to see if the word‘she’would trigger a flicker of curiosity, but Violet’s expression remained unbothered. I didn’t move toward the phone. I didn’t want to break the silence, terrified I’d wake up in my bed and realize my mind had just invented her to make me hate my life a little more.
Violet tossed her long black hair over her shoulder, tugging the collar of her oversized sweater back up. “Well, see you around,basement boy. Don’t drown in the mud or get attacked by frogs.”
I watched as she turned and walked off into the woods, my eyes straining as the grey mist swallowed her whole. I stood there in the mud, paralyzed by a sudden, desperate panic for her to come back. I wanted her to turn around and tell me that the world was actually ending, because if she wasn’t in it, I didn’t see the point of the sun coming up tomorrow.
My phone finally stopped vibrating. The lake had settled back into a stagnant silence, but the solitude that I had spent a lifetime perfecting suddenly felt like a void. My isolation was no longer a choice, but rather starvation—a deep hunger to be in her presence again.
That fucking spark.
⛧°. ⋆༺♱༻⋆. °⛧
ɪ ʜᴏᴘᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴇɴᴊᴏʏᴇᴅ ᴍʏ ɴᴇᴡ ꜱᴛᴏʀʏ! ꜰᴇᴇʟ ꜰʀᴇᴇ ᴛᴏ ʟᴇᴛ ᴍᴇ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴛʜɪɴᴋ ꜱᴏ ꜰᴀʀ!
⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆♱⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺
